[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 12 pjproject installation testing needed!

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:55 PM, Matthew Jordan <mjordan at digium.com> wrote:
>
> Because pjproject itself embeds a number of third party libraries, getting
> pjproject properly configured for a distribution/environment can be a bit
> tricky. We've taken the current findings and issues that people have run
> into and put together a page on the Asterisk wiki here:

Sigh...  I know that Asterisk has a long history of embedding
third-party libraries, but for me to seriously consider packaging
pjproject/pjsip for Fedora everything in the third-party directory has
got to go.

First off, there's MP3 related code in there.  Even though it doesn't
directly include any MP3 encoding/decoding code it's just not a battle
worth dealing with.  Another oddity is that the code only looks like
it works on Windows by loading a LAME .dll file.  In any case, adding
MP3 support to a project needs to be dealt with through a generic
plugin architecture (much how like Asterisk deals with codec support
now).

Second, most of the libraries are already included in Fedora, and I'm
sure many other distributions as well.  The included versions are
likely old and buggy.  For example, I know that libsrtp about a month
ago had a security bugfix.

Third, I don't want to have to track down the original version of the
libraries that was imported and see what changes may have been made
locally, or see what bugfixes might be missing by not using a newer
upstream version.  Not to mention investigating licensing or patent
problems.

Fourth, would the the third-party libraries get installed in a way
that conflcts with system-provided libraries, thereby causing problems
for other programs that use those libraries, either now or in the
future?

Fifth, when projects import third-party libraries like this, it's
really saying to me that perhaps they don't work well with others.  If
there are changes that they can't (or won't) get upstream, I have to
wonder if the changes were rejected because they were poorly
implemented or perhaps just a bad idea in general?  Maybe the changes
were never sent for review by the upstream at all.  I have no idea if
any of this is true of pjproject, but it certainly leaves me with a
bad impression.

Lastly, I find the "user convenience" arguments specious.  As you can
see above, importing the code into your projects makes my job of
packaging the software *harder* for Fedora, not easier.

--
Jeff Ollie